Opinion: What do IBM's Open AJAX initiative and net neutrality have in common? The common good.With all the bad feelings engendered by Google's Chinese shenanigans of late, my hope gland grew a little larger at the announcement on February 1 that heavy hitters like IBM, Google, RedHat, Oracle, Mozilla, Novell and others are supporting an Open AJAX initiative to keep the rapidly-becoming-ubiquitous technology a, "multibrowser, multiclient, multiserver and multitool Web standard," to quote Scott Dietzen of Zimbra.
By promoting open-source toolkits and development frameworks the group hopes to keep AJAX open and free to spurn innovation and development.
Horray! And not horray! because the adoption of the standard by such a large and influential group will make it easier to develop new Web 2.0-ish applications. But I offer a rather a huge horray! for another step forward to keeping the Web and the Internet as they were meant to be.
I don't think it's overstating the case to say that we're deep in the midst of a major battle for the heart and soul of the Web and this time the good guys did the right thing.
2005 Web predictions were mostly wrong. Click here to read more.
Hyperbole? Well, when you look at what's going on out there it seems like certain forces in the corporate and governmental realm are starting to get a little itchy over the fact that none of them can really control the Internet.
Forces in the government want to regulate it and can't (witness all the battles over porn, gambling and taxes). The entertainment industry is being driven apoplectic (now they're even suing people who don't own computers!).
Companies like Microsoft—OK, heck…let's just say Microsoft—that built their fortunes on controlling usage and access to their software keep trying to force their own proprietary standards on us developers, publishers and consumers or have continued to ignore commonly-agreed-to standards.
Microsoft has sort of given ground on a few issues, but for the most part, control seems to be the overarching strategy.
Standards aside, there may be even more nefarious forces at work. In an article in The Nation (ironically published the same day that the OpenAJAX initiative was launched), journalist Jeff Chester revealed a plan that the big telecoms, with Cisco's help, are working on to hijack the very infrastructure of the Internet itself, turning it into a place where we all have to pay for our traffic and where they can limit how much bandwidth a subscriber gets based on how they pay.
This "price discrimination" model is being touted to the Congress and the FCC as something necessary to "drive a market-based and capitalist economy."
But price discrimination may just be the first step. The next is to employ "deep packet inspection" to develop "advanced billing schemes" so that broadband doesn't become a low-priced commodity.
Providers would be able to deploy business rules around types of content, allowing greater priority for stuff they like and lower priority for things that they don't want on their network.
If Comcast decides it doesn't like P2P traffic, for example, they could block it out. If Verizon decides that Skype or other Internet telephony products cut into their long distance service, they could shut if off at the packet level.
The bottom line is this: we're in the midst of a battle for the heart and soul of the Internet, whether most folks know it or not. On the one side are those who are trying to keep the 'Net the way it's been—open and free for the common good.
On the other side you've got those who want to impose their own standards and control schemes in order to boost their profits and protect market share.
The reason that the Internet has succeeded thus far and the reason it's become such a driver of economics, positive social change, innovation and the free exchange of ideas is because it's been open, free and not under anyone's control.
If this is going to continue it's only going to be because the battle is being fought one standard at a time. Open AJAX is one step in the right direction.
Online Media 
